Tag: backup
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QNAP is a company that designs great network attached storages (NAS). Unfortunately, even their NAS can crash. Mine did. Before you get to how to recover the lost data, here’s my NAS and RAID spec (so that you can understand what and why I did):

QNAP TS-410U

RAID5

4 HDD (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, /dev/sdd)

Approximately 1.4 TB of data

Fortunately I had the most important data already backuped somewhere else (less pressure and stresses during fixing)

And this is what happened to it:

NAS software update (for 1 week everything was working fine)

NAS rejected one of my HDDs (/dev/sda) due to SMART status.

RAID5 is now in degradation mode.

Broken HDD has been removed (not replaced!).

NAS has been shutdown (I didn’t plan to use it so I turn it off for 2 weeks – just in case).

NAS would not boot with HDDs inside (well it would boot but it didn’t get an IP address, so that I could get to it).

NAS is not reachable at all (despite the fact that it seemed to work just fine).

Basic system reset (3s) didn’t help at all (still no network connection).

Booting without any hard drives

You won’t be able to do anything, unless you manage to get online with your QNAP. If it’s just a software issue (which was in my case), follow these instructions:

You should be able to reach the following website: http://your-nas-ip-address:8080/

Unfortunately you don’t have any hard drives connected, so no data recovery yet ;)

No hard drives and no setup equals no way to recover data

Before you attach our hard drives and restore RAID, you need to know one thing: QNAP that is not a setup with at least 1 HDD, won’t provide you with any tools like scp or rsync. You will be able to examine your HDDs (there’s mdadm luckily), but you won’t transfer your data via LAN. All network tools are only available once you perform a full setup. Also keep in mind, that you should perform a whole new installation with your RAID hard drives unplugged (just in case).

Spare HDD to the rescue

Make your NAS available via SSH with all the tools you need.
To do this, you will have to have one spare hard drive (any SATA HDD will be ok). Now:

Turn off your NAS.

Plug in your HDD.

Make sure your RAID HDDs are unplugged.

Power on your NAS.

Once it boots, go to admin page and perform a quick setup.

Now you should be able to connect to it via SSH (ssh admin@your-nas-ip) user: admin, password: admin

Once you connect, check if you have the following commands available: rsync, scp, mdadm

Reassembling RAID5 and mounting it to recover data

I used the first HDD slot for a temporary “rescue” HDD (/dev/sda). So it won’t be included when I will reassemble the rest of HDDs.

Before you assemble anything, you need to check if there’s valid RAID data on each of the remaining HDDs: